SCP-242

SCP-242 SCP-242 is a backyard swimming pool in New Mexico that turns things into sterile water. The house looks ordinary enough that the Foundation can keep two researchers there posing as a married couple. There's a wall around the yard, a guard pretending to be their live-in cook, and a pool you're absolutely not supposed to get into. The effect goes well beyond keeping the water clean. River water takes seven minutes to sterilize. Stagnant pond water takes eighteen. Fifty thousand liters of coal tar take twelve days, but the pool eventually converts that too. Whatever you put in there becomes water if you leave it long enough. The pool equipment starts running when something other than sterile water enters. The jets and waterfall switch on even without power, and the vacuum moves around the bottom through material that should make that impossible. They remove the filtration pipes and find them empty and dry while the process is still happening. So none of this is actually being accomplished by the cleaning equipment, despite how normal it might look to somebody standing in the yard. That's exactly what happens to a young couple who climb over the wall while the property is only being watched by camera. They get into the pool with inflatable rafts. When the jets activate, the woman wants to leave, but the man assumes it's just an automatic cleaning cycle. They stay, eventually describing the water as warm and tingly, and fall asleep on the rafts. Both rafts fail within seconds of each other. Once the couple are back in the water, it starts frothing and turning red. They try to get out, don't make it, and the pool becomes clear again. Afterward the Foundation adds an actual human guard. The public explanation is that the couple ran away together to Mexico. The research log asks another reasonable question: is water taken out of the pool still dangerous? Two people are put in modified titanium diving suits. One is lowered into the pool and drinks directly from it. The other remains outside and drinks water that has been collected in a barrel. The person outside describes ordinary, pleasant water and finishes the experiment without detected physiological changes. The person inside reports increasing heat and pain, loses a dental filling, and eventually stops responding. The suit suffers electrical and structural failure and is completely lost after about fifteen hours. Even the equipment bought them only a limited amount of time. Removed water has an odd property where it stays separate from contaminated water rather than mixing normally, but the drinking test doesn't show it carrying the pool's destructive effect into the second person. That distinction matters. The location is doing something that a barrel of its water doesn't reproduce in the test. By the end, the Foundation is considering it for disposal of difficult SCP-related materials. It could be useful for that. It also already has a history of people disappearing into a completely ordinary-looking backyard, and the experiment makes clear how calmly the researchers are willing to watch it happen again. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-242